Book picks similar to
Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents by Michael Hudson
economics
econ
sachbuch
business-finance-economics
The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business
Umair Haque - 2011
Trillions of dollars of financial assets and shareholder value destroyed; worldwide GDP stalled; new jobs vanishingly scarce. But this isn’t just a severe recession. It’s evidence that our economic institutions are obsolete—a set of ideas inherited from the industrial age that no longer work for business, people, society, or the future.In The New Capitalist Manifesto, economic strategist Umair Haque argues that business as usual has outgrown the old paradigm of short-term growth, competition at all costs, adversarial strategy, and pushing costs onto future generations. These outworn assumptions are good for creating only “thin” value—gains that are largely illusory and produce diminishing returns every year. For “thick” value—enduring, meaningful, sustainable advantage that deeply benefits the larger society—Haque details five new cornerstones of prosperity in the twenty-first century:•Loss advantage: From value chains to value cycles•Responsiveness: From value propositions to value conversations•Resilience: From strategy to philosophy•Creativity: From protecting a marketplace to completing a marketplace•Difference: From goods to bettersThe New Capitalist Manifesto makes a passionate, razor-sharp economic case that these methods will produce a more enduring prosperity for business as well as society.
The Great Crash Ahead: Strategies for a World Turned Upside Down
Harry S. Dent Jr. - 2011
Dent, Jr., predicted that the stimulus plan created in response to the first crisis would hit demographic and debt saturation headwinds and ultimately fail. In 2010, the stimulus plan had started to fail, and it was already stalling by the first quarter of 2011. The Great Crash Ahead outlines why the next crash and crisis is inevitable, and just around the corner—coming between 2012 and 2014. With incisive critical analysis and historical examples, this book lays bare the traditional assumptions of economics. Dent shows that the government doesn’t drive our economy, consumers and businesses do; that the Fed does not create most of the money in our economy, the private banking system does; and that the largest generation in history is now saving for or moving into retirement, meaning slowing growth. This is the new normal! Our banking system borrowed to lend for the first time in history with unprecedented leverage and debt levels of $42 trillion, way beyond the massive government debt. But the government’s promises and unfunded liabilities take the cake, at an estimated $66 trillion and growing! These massive debts will have to be restructured in a time of slowing spending, and this means a deflationary crisis, which is very different from the inflationary crisis of the 1970s and requires very different personal, investment, and business strategies. Dent and Johnson outline these strategies in very practical detail. In the coming years, the greatest surprise will be that the U.S. dollar becomes the safe haven and appreciates just when everyone is calling for it to crash, while the gold and silver bubbles burst along with the stock and commodity bubbles. And real estate will see another round of declines just when everyone thought it could go no lower. The Great Crash Ahead is about making smart, cautious investments—avoiding the sort of high-risk, high-profit investment schemes that sank the world economy. The road to recovery will be filled with challenges and will require massive change, such as debt restructuring, plans for greater employment, the restructuring of social welfare programs such as social security and health care, budget cuts, and higher taxes—in short, a revision of the kind of lifestyle that characterized the “Roaring 2000s.” The good news is this process will eliminate tens of trillions of dollars of debt and can make way for growth again as the echo boom generation ascends. Or we can continue on our present course and end up like the Japanese, with no growth and high debt two decades later.
The Wealth of Nations, Books 1-3
Adam Smith - 1776
Books I - III of The Wealth of Nations examine the 'division of labour' as the key to economic growth, by ensuring the interdependence of individuals within society. They also cover the origins of money and the importance of wages, profit, rent and stocks; but the real sophistication of his analysis derives from the fact that it encompasses a combination of ethics, philosophy and history to create a vast panorama of society.This edition contains an analytical introduction offering an in-depth discussion of Smith as an economist and social scientist, as well as a preface, further reading and explanatory notes.
The Federal Reserve Conspiracy
Antony C. Sutton - 1995
This is the first book that details hour by hour the events that led up to passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 - and the many decades of work and secret planning that private bankers had invested to obtain their money monopoly.
Dr. Strangelove's Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius
Paul Strathern - 2001
Strangelove’s Game will do for economics what Sophie’s World did for philosophy and E=mc2 for physics.With the infectious enthusiasm of a great teacher and a novelist’s eye for a colourful parade of often bizarre and idiosyncratic figures, Paul Strathern gives us a vivid account of the world of economics through the lives and minds of those who contributed to the growth of economic thought from the Middle Ages to the present.The familiar and iconic names – Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes – turn out to be fascinating characters, as do a host of lesser-known figures – from Luca Pacioli, a medieval monk who used a ball game to stimulate thought about probability theory (and gambling) to John von Neumann, the manic genius who invented game theory, worked on the atomic bomb, and was probably the model for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. There are pessimistic priests, visionary socialists, crackpot academics, and an alleged murderer who controlled France’s finances.Paul Strathern sets their lives and thoughts against the dramatic backdrop of great events – the South Sea Bubble, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Great Crash. His lightly worn erudition makes Dr. Strangelove’s Game amazingly accessible, leaving readers enriched and enlightened.From the Hardcover edition.
Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
Ruchir Sharma - 2012
We need to remember that sustained economic success is a rare phenomenon.As an era of easy money and easy growth comes to a close, China in particular will cool down. Other major players including Brazil, Russia, and India face their own daunting challenges and inflated expectations. The new "breakout nations" will probably spring from the margins, even from the shadows. Ruchir Sharma, one of the world’s largest investors in emerging markets for Morgan Stanley, here identifies which are most likely to leap ahead and why.After two decades spent traveling the globe tracking the progress of developing countries, Sharma has produced a book full of surprises: why the overpriced cocktails in Rio are a sign of revival in Detroit; how the threat of the "population bomb" came to be seen as a competitive advantage; how an industrial revolution in Asia is redefining what manufacturing can do for a modern economy; and how the coming shakeout in the big emerging markets could shift the spotlight back to the West, especially American technology and German manufacturing.What emerges is a clear picture of the shifting balance of global economic power and how it plays out for emerging nations and for the West. In a captivating exploration studded with vignettes, Sharma reveals his rules on how to spot economic success stories. Breakout Nations is a rollicking education for anyone looking to understand where the future will happen.
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
William D. Cohan - 2009
Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt. But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company). Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.
iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age
Bill Gertz - 2017
Covert information warfare is being waged by world powers, rogue states—such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—and even terrorist groups like ISIS. This conflict has been designed to defeat and ultimately destroy the United States. This new type of warfare is part of the Information Age that has come to dominate our lives. In iWar, Bill Gertz describes how technology has completely revolutionized modern warfare, how the Obama administration failed to meet this challenge, and what we can and must do to catch up and triumph over this timely and important struggle.
Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness
Joe Kennedy - 2018
So-called illiberal democracy and authoritarian populism are in the political ascendant; the shelves of our bookshops groan with the work of attention-grabbing thinkers insisting that permissiveness, multiculturalism and 'identity politics' have failed us and that we must now fall back on some notion of tradition. We have had our fun, and now it's time to get serious, to shore our fragments against the ruin of postmodernist meaninglessness. It's not only the usual, conservative suspects who have got on board with this argument. Authentocrats critiques the manner in which post-liberal ideas have been mobilised underhandedly by centrist politicians who, at least notionally, are hostile to the likes of Donald Trump and UKIP. It examines the forms this populism of the centre has taken in the United Kingdom and situates the moderate withdrawal from liberalism within a story which begins in the early 1990s. Blairism promised socially liberal politics as the pay-off for relinquishing commitments to public ownership and redistributive policies: many current centrists insist New Labour's error was not its capitulation to the market, but its unwillingness to heed the allegedly natural conservatism of England's provincial working classes. In this book, we see how this spurious concern for 'real people' is part of a broader turn within British culture by which the mainstream withdraws from the openness of the Nineties under the bad-faith supposition that there's nowhere to go but backwards. The self-anointing political realism which declares that the left can save itself only by becoming less liberal is matched culturally by an interest in time-worn traditional identities: the brute masculinity of Daniel Craig's James Bond, the allegedly 'progressive' patriotism of nature writing, a televisual obsession with the World Wars. Authentocrats charges liberals themselves with fuelling the post-liberal turn, and asks where the space might be found for an alternative.
Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance
Greta R. Krippner - 2011
economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In "Capitalizing on Crisis," Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation.Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state's attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979.Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.
China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know
Arthur R. Kroeber - 2016
In the 1980s China was an impoverished backwater, struggling to escape the political turmoil and economic mismanagement of the Mao era. Today it isthe world's second biggest economy, the largest manufacturing and trading nation, the consumer of half the world's steel and coal, the biggest source of international tourists, and one of the most influential investors in developing countries from southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America.China's growth has lifted 700 million people out of poverty. It has also created a monumental environmental mess, with smog-blanketed cities and carbon emissions that are a leading cause of climate change. Multinational companies make billions of dollars in profits in China each year, but tradersaround the world shudder at every gyration of the country's unruly stock markets. Most surprising of all, its capitalist economy is governed by an authoritarian Communist Party that shows no sign of loosening its grip.How did China grow so fast for so long? Can it keep growing and still solve its problems of environmental damage, fast-rising debt and rampant corruption? How long can its vibrant economy co-exist with the repressive one-party state? What do China's changes mean for the rest of the world? China'sEconomy: What Everyone Needs to Know(R) answers these questions in straightforward language that you don't need to be an economist to understand, but with a wealth of detail drawn from academic research, interviews with dozens of company executives and policy makers, and a quarter-century of personalexperience. Whether you're doing business in China, negotiating with its government officials, or a student trying to navigate the complexities of this fascinating and diverse country, this is the one book that will tell you everything you need to know about how China works, where it came from andwhere it's going.
Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget
David Wessel - 2012
Through the eyes of key people--Jacob Lew, White House director of the Office of Management and Budget; Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office; Blackstone founder and former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson; and more--Wessel gives readers an inside look at the making of our unsustainable budget.
Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties
John Solomon - 2020
Not only did the sale of Uranium One put 20 percent of America’s domestic uranium supply under the control of Vladimir Putin, there was also evidence that the Clintons themselves had hugely profited from the deal. When presidential candidate Donald Trump made Uranium One the centerpiece of his “Crooked Hillary” attacks, the Clinton team feared its potential to damage Hillary’s campaign. Others in the Obama-Biden camp worried that if elected, Trump would expose their role in selling out America’s security to Putin.Their desperate need to neutralize the issue led them to launch an unprecedented investigation into the Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia. The infamous Steele dossier, produced by Clinton-connected Fusion GPS, sparked an investigation under FBI Director James Comey. Instead of ending after the election, the investigation grew bigger, eventually leading to Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. When Mueller failed to find grounds for impeachment, Democrats seized on an ambiguous phone call with the Ukrainian president as a pretext to remove Trump from office. This gambit blew up in their faces when it exposed the secrets that Democrats tried hard to keep buried. An indispensable guide to the hidden background of recent events, Fallout shows how Putin’s bid for nuclear dominance produced a series of political scandals that ultimately posed one of the greatest threats to our democracy in modern American history.
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
Paul Collier - 2018
As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now.In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession.Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.